The morning of Monday July 10, 2017 was one where my photographer thought it would be good for us to sleep later than usual. After all, the first site of the day didn’t open until 10:00am and that site was only 30 miles to the north. We left the Holiday Inn Express in Clifton Park, New York at roughly 8:30am under partly cloudy skies with no chance of rain. It seemed as though my cameraman’s wife was in good spirits, especially after the fiasco that we encountered in Hyde Park the day before. We arrived in Wilton just before 9:00am where we continued up the slope of Mount McGregor to Grant’s Cottage State Historic Site. Vicki did a good job navigating the Avenger up the winding road until we came to the Visitor’s Center. I was anxious to visit the two-story cottage where Ulysses S. Grant had spent the final six weeks of his life. He died in his bedroom at the cottage after a long battle with throat cancer on July 23, 1885.
As my photographer got out of the Avenger to enter the Visitor’s Center, that’s when he got the bad news from an employee who had informed us that Grant’s Cottage was closed on Mondays. At first Tom was stunned by the news, but then he soon realized he had added an extra day to the third version of the agenda to accommodate the flea market in Connecticut. His original agenda had us visiting the cottage on Sunday because he knew it wasn’t open on Monday. At that moment, in a last-gasp effort to mend his screw-up, I saw my photographer attempt to work his magic. He went through his usual five-minute spiel about taking me around the country to visit Presidential sites. Tom finished by asking the employee if there was any chance that he could find it in his heart to let us tour the cabin; even though it was closed. The guy said that he did not have the authority to shut off the alarms and open it, but he would allow us to drive up the road and snap a photograph of Grant’s Cottage from the road. Then he added: “Do not step onto the property anywhere as sensors will go off and police from miles around will be here in minutes. You should be able to get decent pictures from the road. I’m sorry you can’t get closer, but that’s the best I can do.”
Grant’s Cottage was located around the bend from the Visitor’s Center. After Vicki parked the car in the middle of the road directly in front of the yellow-colored building, my cameraman took me out of the case and photographed me with the historic cottage in the background. I wanted so badly to see the bed where the President had died; and pose on the porch where Grant was last photographed as he finished his memoirs. I also knew that Tom wasn’t convinced there were sensors in the ground and I could tell that he was itching to test out that theory, but he had promised the guy at the Visitor’s Center that we would stay on the road – which we did. We were so close, yet so far away. Grant’s Cottage would have to wait for another day – it just couldn’t be “another manic Monday”.
By 9:10am I was back in my case and we were headed towards the northern part of Vermont. The next Presidential site on the agenda, which was the birthplace site of Chester Arthur, was located near Fairfield, Vermont; a small town that was roughly 12 miles due south of the Canadian border. When Lennon and McCartney wrote the song “The Long and Winding Road”, they must’ve been thinking of the route that we took to Fairfield. Every so often on our 150-mile drive, Vicki would say “How much farther do we have to go? This is ridiculous.”
At 12:40pm we pulled into the parking lot that was across the small country road from the Chester Arthur Historic Site. As Vicki used the Porta Potty that was near the parking lot, my photographer took me out of the camera case where I got my first look at President Arthur’s birthplace. My first thought was “Oh boy, his wife is gonna get pissed over this one. There isn’t much here and we traveled 150 miles out of our way to see a replica house and a granite marker.”
My photographer carried me across the road and onto the property where I had a good look at the small yellow house. It turned out that the house was constructed on the site in 1953 and historians used an old photo of the original home to replicate the Arthur’s parsonage. We also found out that the home was only open for tours on weekends, which meant we were a day late and a dollar short. A large granite marker that was situated roughly 30-feet from the building marked the exact location of the original dwelling. Robert Todd Lincoln, who was Abraham Lincoln’s oldest son and Secretary of War in President Arthur’s administration, was on hand to help dedicate the birthplace granite marker in 1903.
We spent less than ten minutes during our entire visit at the Chester Arthur Historic Site. When we returned to the Avenger, Vicki was sitting in the driver’s seat with the engine and air conditioning running. As we approached the car, she rolled the window down and asked: “We drove 150 miles out of our way to see that? Are you kidding me right now?” My photographer kept calm and replied: “I know it was a bit out of the way, but that site was very important to me and I didn’t know if I would ever get a chance to come here again; mainly because it’s on the way to nowhere. I’ll tell you what, let’s go to the Ben and Jerry’s factory and have some ice cream. It’s only about an hour away.”
My photographer played the Ben and Jerry’s card exactly at the right time. After all, Tom and Vicki had visited that ice cream heaven when their kids were young and he knew it would bring back good memories for his wife. But when we were about a mile from the Arthur birth site, Tom wanted to make a quick stop at a small, brick church. “That doesn’t look like Ben and Jerry’s to me,” said Vicki sarcastically. It turned out that it was the Fairfield Baptist Church and Chester Arthur’s father once served as the preacher of that church.
The scenery throughout most of Vermont was spectacular, which made the hour-long ride to Ben and Jerry’s factory outside of Waterbury, Vermont more tolerable; especially since it was on the heels of our 150-mile drive to Fairfield from Grant’s Cottage in Wilton, New York. We arrived at the famous ice cream factory at 2:45pm and although I don’t eat the frozen confection, I was still anxious to be carried along on the tour. Photography was not allowed during the half-hour tour of the factory, but Tom was able to capture images before and after the experience. As it turned out, my photographer was in luck; his favorite flavor of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream (Americone Dream) was in production and everyone was given a sample at the tour’s conclusion. As a matter of fact, my gluttonous cameraman wolfed down an entire pint of hand-packed ‘Americone Dream’ that was purchased from the Scoop Shop.
It was a little after 4:00pm when we left Ben and Jerry’s. Our plan was to end our day close to Plymouth Notch, Vermont where we would be in a good geographical location to visit a handful of Calvin Coolidge’s Presidential sites the following morning. But when Vicki scoured the intranet in an effort to find a motel near there, she struck out. We ended up with a reservation in Berlin, Vermont; a small city just south of Montpelier, but a little over an hour north of the Coolidge sites. As we drove near Vermont’s capital city, my photographer thought about stopping to see the Capitol building; but dark storm clouds that hovered over Montpelier made our decision to bypass the Capitol all that much easier.
Soon after we had arrived at the Hilltop Inn in Berlin, Vermont, I was placed next to the television set where I stayed for the remainder of the night. Even though I thought Monday had been a huge disappointment, I was anxious to tour Plymouth Notch in the morning. After all, I was less than fifteen hours from a visit to the 23rd Presidential gravesite since I had begun my ‘Tour of Duty’ in 2013.
When our alarm clock went off at 6:00am on Tuesday July 11, 2017, we saw that the morning sky was extremely overcast. I wasn’t terribly worried as our next destination was 60 miles to the south, but I also knew that a day of rain would put a damper on our tour of the Calvin Coolidge sites. We arrived at the Calvin Coolidge Homestead District at 9:00am and we quickly realized that there was a plethora of historic sites that we would visit during our stay. But out of the 16 sites that made up the Coolidge State Historic Site, we kept our focus on just five of them: The birthplace of Calvin Coolidge; the Florence Cilley General Store that was attached to the birthplace; the Coolidge Homestead where the 30th President lived as a youth; the Union Christian Church where the future President worshiped while in Plymouth; and of course the Presidential gravesite that was located in nearby Plymouth Notch Cemetery.
After my photographer paid our admission fee at the Visitor’s Center, I was carried to the Cilley General Store that was once owned by Calvin’s father Colonel John Coolidge, Sr. The interior of the historic store was filled with hundreds of items, including Coolidge souvenirs, a variety of candies; and the President’s favorite brand of pop – Moxie. As I was carried throughout the store, I posed alongside a very historic telephone that was attached to the wall. In the early morning hours of August 3, 1923, a short time after President Harding had died in San Francisco, that phone rang to inform Vice President Coolidge of the historic news. But when no one was in the store to answer the phone, a messenger was sent to the Coolidge Homestead to inform the Vice President of Harding’s death.
At one point I stood on the store’s counter, near the cash register, and posed alongside an unopened bottle of Moxie. It was cool to stand next to Calvin Coolidge’s favorite soft drink, but when my photographer found out exactly what it tasted like, he never opened the bottle. Moxie was created in 1876 in New England and was originally called ‘Moxie Nerve Food’ that was considered a type of medicine. The store clerk mentioned to us that the flavor tasted like a combination of Dr. Pepper and Root Beer; it was sweet with a bitter aftertaste. When he was asked to drink a bottle of Moxie, my cameraman said: “I don’t like the taste of Dr. Pepper. If this stuff is a bitter version of that, then no thanks. I’ll just keep an unopened bottle for my Presidential collection.”
We finished browsing around the general store and I was anxious to visit the birthplace of Calvin Coolidge; a small part of which we saw through the opening at the rear of the store. Even though it would have been easier to walk into the birth home via that entryway, we were instructed to go around to the back of the store where we found the entrance to the birth home.
John Calvin Coolidge, Jr. was born on July 4, 1872 in the small wooden two-story home that was attached to the Cilley General Store in Plymouth Notch. As I stood near the dark brown structure, it dawned on me that Coolidge was the only President born on the Fourth of July. Three Chief Executives had died on July 4th, but only one was born on that date. Upon entry into the house, the first room we saw to the left of the entryway was the bedroom where President Coolidge was born. We were not allowed to venture into the room, but from the doorway I could see the actual bed that Baby Cal was born on. A small doll was positioned on the bed as well; we were told that the antique toy belonged to Abigail Coolidge, the President’s younger sister who died in 1890 at the age of 15. Another area of the house that we visited was the kitchen/dining room where we saw a highchair situated alongside the family’s dining room table. What I found interesting was that most of the furniture inside the Coolidge home was authentic to the family; a fact that wasn’t always the same in most early Presidential homes. The second-floor bedrooms were not accessible to visitors, which was too bad as one of those rooms would have been where young Coolidge slept for the first four years of his life.
Our tour guide took us from the house where Calvin Coolidge was born to the house where he became President. As I was carried across the street to a larger two-story home, I posed on one of the four rocking chairs that were positioned on the small porch. Off to my right I saw the front door to the house; I immediately thought about that historic night in 1923 when a messenger knocked on that door in the middle of the night and informed Calvin’s father that President Harding had died and that his son was the 30th President.
It was an honor for me to be carried inside the Coolidge Homestead. Not only did Calvin live there from the age of four until the age of 11 when he left for Ludlow’s Black River Academy, it was also the home where he was sworn-in as our 30th President. The interior of the home was filled with authentic furnishings from the Coolidge family; including the historic parlor where Calvin was administered the Presidential Oath of Office by his father – a Vermont notary public and justice of the peace. It was very difficult for my photographer to capture images of me near the parlor for a couple of reasons: the room was backlit from the exterior windows that provided the only light; and the room was enclosed by glass that allowed reflections to wreak havoc on our photos. As I posed along the glass with the parlor behind me, I had wished that I could’ve stood on the historic table next to the Bible that was used in the swearing-in ceremony. All of the furnishings in the room were in the exact same place as they were on August 3, 1923 when Calvin Coolidge became our 30th President. After he recited the oath from his father at 2:47am by the light of a kerosene lamp, the new President went back to bed.
We moved down the hallway to the Coolidge dining room area where we saw a small table, four chairs, and a place setting. It was at that table where Calvin Coolidge ate his first breakfast as President of the United States. After his breakfast, Coolidge packed up his belongings and headed back to Washington D.C.
The last room that we saw in the house was one that was set up to resemble the bedroom that was used by the new President and his wife Grace. Calvin and Grace stayed in an upstairs bedroom on the historic night when he became President. Since the upstairs of the home was not accessible to tourists, their bedroom furniture was moved to the first floor where it was on display behind glass. That bedroom was extremely dark and every attempt by my photographer to capture an image of me near the President’s room proved futile.
After we exited the homestead, the next site on our Coolidge historical tour was the Union Christian Church that located across the street. After I posed for a few photos outside of the 1840’s place of worship, I was carried inside the wooden building where I saw the pew that was used by the Coolidge family; including young Calvin when he was a boy.
After our short visit at the church, we discovered that there was a site located above the Cilley General Store. It turned out that when President Coolidge returned to his hometown of Plymouth, he used the dance hall above the store as his office and Summer White House. When I was carried up the stairs and into the spacious room, I was surprised that the tables, chairs, benches and band equipment were out in the open. As I stood on one of the tables for a photo, it dawned on me that all of the furnishings there must’ve been period pieces. I figured that if they had been used by President Coolidge, everything would’ve been protected to keep bobble heads like me from standing on them.
I thought our tour of the Coolidge historic sites in Plymouth Notch was amazing; especially the time I spent outside of the room where the President was born and near the parlor where he was sworn-in as our 30th President. I was placed back in the camera case as we headed down the road to the nearby beautiful and hilly Plymouth Notch Cemetery. From the parked car, I was carried up two sets of granite stairs and onto the second tier of headstones where I saw the gravesite of Calvin Coolidge.
President Coolidge’s simple granite headstone paled in comparison to some of the Presidential graves that I had visited in the past four years; including Lincoln’s elaborate tomb in Springfield, Garfield’s “Spooktacular” monument in Cleveland; and the awe-inspiring final resting place of John F. Kennedy and its eternal flame in Arlington National Cemetery. Calvin Coolidge died unexpectedly at the age of 60 on January 5, 1933 at his Northampton, Massachusetts home called “The Beeches”.
As I was held in my photographer’s hand for one final breathtaking glimpse of Plymouth Notch Cemetery, I knew that no words could accurately describe the burial ground’s serenity. At that moment, I knew that my silence was a fitting tribute to our 30th President – Silent Cal.
Well done Tom and Thomas J. The narrative was very interesting and the photos were great! The photographer’s wife was a trooper! I learned a great deal about Calvin Coolidge. I was very surprised at the very modest grave. I have to get to Ben and Jerry’s and try some of that broccoli and cheese ice cream!